DDN finalises Tintri buy

DDN is finalising its acquisition of Tintri, the collapsed storage vendor, and expects to complete the purchase in a few days. The company says it will bring immediate support and product continuity to Tintri’s 1,600-strong customer base.

Tintri will operate as a separate division within DDN and will have its own sales, support and engineering resources. The acquisition price has not yet been revealed.

DDN will honour existing support agreements for Tintri customers and says it is rapidly building a sizeable support organisation. It’s investing to expand Tintri’s technology roadmap in server virtualization, NVMe, expanded analytics, databases and other areas.

Tintri T850 array

Comment

By mid-September DDN will be in the scale-out enterprise SAN array business with all-flash and hybrid flash/disk arrays along with management and analytics software. It will need to add an NVMe-oF capability ASAP and adapt the roadmap to react to new flash drive formats, such as rulers, media such as QLC (4bits/cell) 3D NAND, tiering of fast and slow flash, and storage-class memory, meaning 3D XPoint or similar tech.

There is raging competition in this market, with hungry startups and fast-reacting mainstreamers. Also there is a bunch of NVMe-oF carrier protocols to navigate, such as RoCE, iWARP, Fibre Channel and TCP.

DDN must pilot its way through these cross-currents to find a market niche or niches in which its new division can prosper. We imagine that niche will involve super-fast, high-capacity Tintri arrays integrated with some of DDN’s existing storage arrays, which currently run Gluster or Spectrum Scale software on their in-array processors. We are thinking of a Tintri software head integrated into a DDN storage chassis and driving it to provide a virtualized enterprise storage array.